Top 50 Real Estate Investment Market Leaders Award
“Annually Personal Real Estate Investor Magazine recognizes those individuals and businesses demonstrating vision, understanding, and a plan to bring investment services and products to this unique market of repeat real estate buyers.”
Personal Real Estate Investor Magazine is a bimonthly publication that caters specifically to individual residential real estate investors. You can read the full article here, and subscribe to the magazine here.
Introducing Property Fixer for the Mac
Property Fixer is designed for real estate investors who are flipping properties. First, it helps you estimate your improvement costs, holding costs, and closing costs. Then you can change your holding period from 0 to 12 months and instantly see how it affects your profit and return on investment.
Property Fixer also lets you create portfolios of properties and perform a detailed Portfolio Analysis. This helps you quickly create an apples-to-apples comparison between multiple properties. You can sort properties by profit or return on investment to quickly select the best deals.
Finally, you can create a professional Property Report or Portfolio Report as a PDF file, and email it to your clients, lenders, or investment partners. If you’re a real estate agent, you can brand the report with your name and logo and add multiple photos. This will help you sell more investment properties and provide a valuable service for your investor clients. Click this link to download a Sample Report.
New Features for Lion and iOS 5
2012 will also be a great year for analyzing your potential deals with Property Evaluator on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac! Here’s a quick summary of the latest new features, and a sneak peak at what’s next.
New Features
In July of 2011, Apple released OS X 10.7 Lion for the Mac, and in October they released iOS 5 for the iPhone and iPad. These are the most significant updates in recent years, and they add many new features for users and developers.
Version 3.9 of Property Evaluator was just released, and it now requires OS X 10.7 Lion or iOS 5 as the minimum operating system. If you’re still running iOS 4 on your iPhone or iPad, you can still run version 3.8, but iOS 5 is a free update, and it’s compatible with the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, and any iPad, so you really should update when you get a chance.
The main reason for requiring iOS 5 and Lion is that iCloud requires them (more on iCloud and syncing later). The other reason is that Apple added a new compiler technology called ARC that makes apps run faster, and it makes them much more resistant to crashes and memory bugs. All of the Real Estate Tools apps are now fully converted to ARC.
One of the new features in version 3.9 is the ability to print the PDF reports directly from your iPhone or iPad. Note that this requires an AirPrint-compatible printer. You can also install some utilities on your Mac to enable AirPrint from any of your printers. My favorite is Printopia.
I also spent quite a bit of time optimizing the PDF reports to reduce the file size. In many of my tests, especially with properties that had lots of photos, the PDF file size was about 80% smaller than before. This will make it faster and easier to email your real estate projections to your clients, lenders, and investment partners.
Another new feature is that now you can choose whether you want to copy the photos when you duplicate a property. This is really helpful when you want to create projections for several similar properties, where the main differences are the street address and the photos.
You might have noticed that the Property Reports now include some colorful new graphs of Cash Flow, Equity, and Internal Rate of Return. These are the most important financial metrics in real estate investing, and it’s really helpful to see a visual representation 30 years into the future.
What’s Next?
The most popular feature request over the last year has been to add the ability to sync data between the iPhone, iPad, and Mac versions of Property Evaluator. Syncing data across multiple devices is a very challenging technical problem, but fortunately, Apple introduced a new service called iCloud in Lion and iOS 5 that makes syncing much easier to implement. The ability to sync the data in Property Evaluator is under development, and it should be available within the next couple of months.
Another popular feature request has been to make it faster and easier to estimate your improvement costs. The next major release will feature a completely new approach to estimating your improvement costs. More on this in a future blog post…
Real Estate Investment Portfolio Analysis
You can download a sample Portfolio Analysis Report to see what it looks like.
Here’s a quick summary of what you can do:
• Create multiple property portfolios.
• Add up to 26 properties to each portfolio.
• A property can belong to multiple portfolios.
• The Portfolio Analysis shows you a comparison of the main financial metrics for each property in the portfolio.
• You can also see the combined performance of all properties in the portfolio.
• View a map showing all of the properties in the portfolio.
• Email a portfolio report to your clients, lenders, or investment partners as a PDF file.
• You can also sort properties alphabetically, by date added, or by key financial metrics.
I’m already getting some great feedback from customers who are using the portfolio analysis. Investors are using it to filter out the best deals from a large number of properties that they’re thinking about buying. Real estate agents are using it to put together portfolio reports for their clients who are interested in buying several properties at once. Other real estate agents are creating a portfolio for each one of their investor clients, and customizing each portfolio to each client’s needs.
Please take a look at the portfolio analysis in version 3.7 and let me know what you think!
Version 3.6 Adds Several New Features
- Now you can add your company logo to the Cover Page and header of the PDF Report
- There's a new Overview page in the PDF report, which includes a financial summary, property photo, and a map of the property location
- Now you can add Initial Improvements, which are included in the Initial Cash Invested. This is intended for the initial rehab and capital improvements that are done when you first purchase the property.
- Itemized Buying Costs and Selling Costs are now shown in the PDF report
- The mortgage info is not displayed in the PDF report when the loan amounts are zero. This simplifies the report for an all-cash purchase.
- Added Rent per Square Foot and the Operating Expense Ratio to the Purchase Summary
- The Property Description and Notes fields are now included in all versions of the app